Editor's Note: With this post we welcome Swarnalatha Bhaskaran to the Celsias writing team. Swarna is writing for us from South India and is an Aerospace Engineer by trade. She starts us off with a thought provoking post on waste. Read it and get inspired to join the "Choose Products with Less Packaging" action.
"A zero waste approach is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective strategies to protect the climate." Stop trashing the climate tries to convey this sane and simple message - hear, hear!
Are the world's biggest individual consumers and businesses - permit me to call them environmental atheists - listening? A drastically reduced consumption level is the only answer to sustainability. Those people who put the environment uppermost in thought and deed are probably following this strategy in letter and spirit.
Remember that for every trash can generated by an individual, garbage amounting to seventy-five times this volume has already been generated, and waiting for disposal, ‘upstream'. See Annie Leonard's ‘The story of Stuff'.
The idea of a linear pattern of consumption on this planet, whose resources are finite, was never logical -whole countries' economic development cycles start with tapping nature to produce, consume and dispose goods mindlessly, then moving on to tapping even more from Nature.
It is time each one of us realized that when we buy packaged stuff off the shelf without a second thought, then consume the contents and discard the pack, we are abetting a civic crime for which posterity is both the victim and the judge.
One week is all it takes for you to convert from a-bag-a-day kind of trash generator to a-bag-a-month kind. I know, because I did. Once you are convinced, it's a matter of hastening slowly. You'll soon wonder why you were not enlightened thus far.
With each passing day, the environmental cost of each human activity multiplies several-fold. Even though we are well past the stage of mere academic / drawing-board / conference discussions on climate change and sustainable consumption, active debate (how else do we educate the eco-illiterate?) and action have to continue.
When you next pick up an item at the retail outlet - stop, think and replace it right there. The mantra continues to be ‘reduce, reuse, re-cycle, repair and re-source'. It only got louder.
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